


The center of her own galaxy. The story of Matsuoka Gou.

by subtlyfailing



Series: For those whose stories were not told. [1]
Category: Free!
Genre: Coming of Age, Death of a Parent, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Trauma, coping with loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtlyfailing/pseuds/subtlyfailing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let’s talk about how Gou Matsuoka loses her father at four. How she lives her whole life with sorrow running beneath her skin, through her veins, her bones. Now, let’s talk about how she smiles at strangers on the sidewalk because their stories may be much sadder than her own.</p><p>Her brother is the one with the tears, the screaming, with the violent outbursts. Gou carries many of the same scars, but they do not show themselves in poisonous words or harsh actions, or in tears. They show themselves in late night calls to her brother, and all-nighters drawing up workout plans, and dogeared pages in nutritional cookbooks. They show themselves in how fiercely she cares.</p><p>Gou shapes herself to be a survivor. She cooks dinner for her mother on weekdays, she picks chrysanthemums to put in vases and she goes out to tea with Hana every Saturday. She counts down the days until New Years and teaches herself to cook all her brother’s favourite meals.</p><p>She copes.</p><p>You can tell a billion stories about girls who light incense at their father’s graves and text their brothers good night before falling asleep.</p><p>No one has ever told Gou’s story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The center of her own galaxy. The story of Matsuoka Gou.

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [她自己星系的中心——松冈江的故事](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6197470) by [our_flame_never_goes_out](https://archiveofourown.org/users/our_flame_never_goes_out/pseuds/our_flame_never_goes_out)



Let’s talk about how Gou Matsuoka loses her father at four. How she lives her whole life with sorrow running beneath her skin, through her veins, her bones. Now, let’s talk about how she smiles at strangers on the sidewalk because their stories may be much sadder than her own.

Her brother is the one with the tears, the screaming, with the violent outbursts. Gou carries many of the same scars, but they do not show themselves in poisonous words or harsh actions, or in tears. They show themselves in late night calls to her brother, and all-nighters drawing up workout plans, and dogeared pages in nutritional cookbooks. They show themselves in how fiercely she cares.

Gou shapes herself to be a survivor. She cooks dinner for her mother on weekdays, she picks chrysanthemums to put in vases and she goes out to tea with Hana every Saturday. She counts down the days until New Years and teaches herself to cook all her brother’s favourite meals.

She copes.

You can tell a billion stories about girls who light incense at their father’s graves and text their brothers good night before falling asleep.

No one has ever told Gou’s story.    

 

Let’s talk about how Gou Matsuoka was the girl who was left behind again and again. From her father who would never come back from sea, to her brother who came back and left and came back again so many times that Gou eventually grew tired of weeping in airport halls. All the way to broad neighbour boys with big dreams who chase bright futures; who always promised to call, but who never did.   

Let’s talk about how Gou, each time, picks herself up and dusts herself off and carries on.

Let’s talk about how her cheeks are dry as she does so.

 

It’s not that she hasn’t wept. Barely a month passes since the funeral, when the nightmares wake her up. There is a summer storm raging outside her bedroom window, and when she wakes, she feels the storm rage inside her chest as well. Her mind’s eye sees stormy seas and sinking ships, and a cold, dead darkness she is too young to understand. She wakes her brother up sobbing, and when he sees her tears, he starts sobbing as well.

They make themselves hot chocolate and creep closely together to fall asleep beneath Rin’s shark-patterned comforter. Years later, the first time Gou makes hot chocolate by herself on a stormy night it tastes like loneliness so fierce it makes her bones brittle.

There is selfishness in sorrow, they say. After all, you grieve not for the dead, but for the living left behind. The fresh wounds of a four-year-old much differs from the ones which she carries at sixteen. Her scars are in her fingertips grasping on too tightly, strained by too many good-byes, because the things that she loves always slips out of her reach, people disappear like water between her fingertips - and she cannot swim to save her life. 

 

Tell me the story of Gou Matsuoka, and how she knows what it is to grow up alone. She knows what it is to trace constellations with her fingers and wonder if the same stars light up the sky a million miles away.

At eleven she learns how the stars are so far away they may have been dead for hundreds of years before their lights first reach her.  She is eleven; looking up at the sky and thinking how strange it is for something so beautiful to be so lonely. 

Years later, Sousuke Yamazaki looks at a seventeen year old her, and thinks the exact same thing.

 

At ten, she watches her brother swim and sees happiness. “A relay”, he calls it, the night before, a bright smile on his face. He’s packing his bag, and Gou is watching him from the rug on the floor.  

“I’ve found a good team that I wanna swim with, and we’ve practiced really hard,” he says, and then his expression turns wistful. “Dad would be proud,” he says, voice quieter.   

She is ten then, and the wound her father left is still too fresh. She weeps, but Rin hugs away her tears, and ruffles her hair as she quiets. “Come cheer on me tomorrow”, he says. And she does.

In fact, she never stops doing so.

She watches from the tribunes, and carefully pockets the happiness she sees. She locks it away and saves it for a rainy day, when these memories are needed for her brother to keep his head above water.

 _I would take his broken pieces and put him back together with my own two hands if I could_ , she thinks to herself, as she watches her brother grow colder, New Years after New Years. 

Her dreams are haunted by drowning men. And her brother is haunted by demons that she does not presume to understand. But when she finally looks at Rin and doesn’t see the boy she grew up with, when postcard promises and absent phone calls finally become too much for her to take, she puts her trust in bold boys with big dreams who are far too stubborn to chase them.

She goes to find the silent one, with eyes like oceans. The one that, in her memories, her brother looks at with the same admiration with which she looks at him.

What she finds is so much more.

 

“Haru’s back to his old self,” Makoto says to her, not long after they’ve met. The boys are restoring the pool, and she is supplying them with drinks. He doesn’t look up from his work as Gou lets her gaze shift to the black-haired boy. Nagisa is talking to him, but Gou doubts he’s getting any response.

Somehow, she’s found kinship in Makoto Tachibana, the boy with the kind smile (and the perfectly shaped trapezius muscles), who like her is trying to save a loved one from their demons. Gou looks at him and sees someone who, in his own way, is trying to keep that person’s head above water (though, with Haru, it’s somewhat more literal than with Rin).

Swimming with her brother had changed something in Haruka-Senpai. “Will my brother go back to his old self as well?” she questions quietly. She doesn’t mean to say it out loud, and if Makoto hears, he gives no reaction.

 _We may be able to help each other_ , she thinks, and offers to join their swim club as a manager.

 

It’s hard to say if she feels a part of them, this odd little band of brothers. In fact, does she even want to be at first? After all, what does these bold boys see when they look at her?

She’s Rin’s sister, or Super Manager Gou, or That Girl In The Swim Club Who’s Obsessed With Muscles. Then there’s Sousuke, who looks at her and sees loneliness, and Rin himself, who sees something to be protected, and the Mikoshiba brothers who see beauty. How many of them looks at her and sees a _person_?

Kindness and excitement and anger and loneliness. They all bubble beneath the ivory and the ruby of her skin and hair. Gou Matsuoka is a manager and sister and a friend and a woman and a human being. She is the one who remembers what her brother forgets, and she remembers it clearly enough for the both of them.

She carries a pink camera in her purse and stacks photo albums on her desk. She sees empty spaces and wonders why her brother is not there to fill them, where he belongs. She takes snapshots of happiness and pockets them for a rainy day. 

She is the one who speaks harshly to bold boys (far be it for any other being to tell Haruka Nanase to eat anything other than his precious mackerel. But Gou does, arms akimbo, cheeks blazing with trepidation). She is the one who weeps with joy when their dreams come true.

She is the girl who dives headfirst into the world of swimming, but who does not swim.

Let’s say she too dreamed once, let’s say she listened to her father’s stories and dreamed. To claim the seas like he had done. To let them ensnare her and make her free.

Let’s say that once upon a time, she believed in mermaids.

 

I see a little girl with big dreams who ask her father when he will teach her to swim, and when her father pats her on the head and says “when I get home”, she believes him. I see a seventeen-year-old girl who is still waiting.

She is surrounded by swimmers who sees so much in the water that she doesn’t. Haruka looks at water and sees freedom, Rin looks at it and sees dreams, Nagisa sees escape, and Rei sees beauty. Meanwhile, Gou looks at water and sees everyone who’s ever left her.

She sees stormy greys and sinking ships, she sees absent phone calls and cold shoulders. She sees loneliness. Gou’s father disappears at sea, but leaves his dreams behind in the light of a little boy’s eyes, he leaves his dreams and a little girl who will never swim.

 

 “I told you to call me Kou,” Gou would yell, her face scrunched up in annoyed fury. “Not Gou!”

“Eh, but Gou-Chan is Gou-Chan,” Nagisa would answer, mischievous eyes twinkling. Sometimes she hates Nagisa Hazuki, and the way he smiles like sunshine, his eyes shining fuchsia as he teases her. For her name, for her beauty (“Gou-chan, you used your sex-appeal again!”) Sometimes she hates him, but mostly, she loves him. She loves him like she loves all of them. Gou is sixteen and rejects her own name. Nagisa is the same age, and refuses to consent to that rejection.

Maybe he sees something she doesn’t. Or maybe he just likes watching her face flush with annoyance as the syllables of her birth name roll off his tongue. She grows tired of telling him one day, and with frustrated tears in her eyes, she asks him why. Why won’t he just call her Kou, like she wants him to? 

“Because Gou-Chan is Gou Chan,” he says again. This time, his voice more quiet. More gentle. “Only Gou-Chan is Gou-Chan. Who else will be Gou-Chan if not for Gou-Chan?”

It makes sense, in that strange way only Nagisa can make sense. He hugs her in that way only he knows how, that way that makes her warm all the way into the empty spaces in her ribcage. She doesn’t tell them to call her Kou again. She stands in front of the mirror, and looks at the girl staring back. She whispers her name to the girl in the mirror. Forming pink lips around the single syllable. And she thinks that yes, yes this is me.

Gou takes sixteen years to grow into her name. They say her namesake was the daughter of a warlord. Gou’s father was a fisherman, but she carries a battlefield inside her. She is a girl with storms inside her belly and fire in her lungs. Gou built and beamed and bossed and breathed, and kissed her own bandaged knees. Her existence was a lonely one. But she lived and loved and circled her brother’s orbit.

When her brother found his happiness again, she cried.

 

It’s both a blessing and a curse to love something more than you love yourself. Rin was both her blessing and her curse. 

She is Gou Matsuoka who looks at white lilies and thinks of death, who looks at her brother and sees healing, who cooks meals and manages the club and watches boys achieve their dreams.

Maybe eventually years will pass and she will blossom into a woman. She grows into herself and leaves her battles behind. Maybe she holds on a little less tightly and stops hiding under her comforter on stormy nights. Maybe she still has scars, but she keeps coping, because what else can she do?

When Mikoshiba Seijooru calls her cute, she smiles politely and says thank you, but she swells with pride when the flamboyant swim coach calls her clever.

Maybe, one day, she will fall in love with bold boys with big dreams? Boys who takes the time to learn all her sharp edges and makes her hot chocolate on nights when ships and stormy waters make their way into her nightmares. Boys who look at Marsuoka Gou, flaming locks and bright eyes, and love her every quirk and mishap.

Maybe she grows into her name, her body, the empty spaces between her ribs where her storms have raged. Maybe she grows into herself and drifts out of her brother’s orbit to shine on her own.

Maybe, eventually, she’ll be the centre of her own galaxy.

Maybe she’ll still shine – burn brightly like the red in her hair and the fierceness glowing behind her eyes. Maybe she’ll learn, and love, and live, separately from the boy whose happiness she has dedicated her entire existence to.

Gou Matsuoka is a girl who burns incense at her father’s grave and carries battles inside her belly. Her sorrows, she carries on her own.

Her story is one which is never told.

 

_End._


End file.
